The WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (JMP) has released its latest update: “Progress on household drinking-water, sanitation and hygiene 2000-2024: Special focus on inequalities”.
Launched during World Water Week, 24-28 August 2025, the new report reveals that, while some progress has been made, major gaps persist. People living in low-income countries, fragile contexts, rural communities, children, and minority ethnic and indigenous groups face the greatest disparities.
RELEVANT SUSTAINABLE GOALS
Key facts include:
- 2.1 billion people still lack access to safely managed drinking water, including 106 million who drink directly from untreated surface sources.
- 3.4 billion people still lack safely managed sanitation, including 354 million who practise open defecation.
- 1.7 billion people still lack basic hygiene services at home, including 611 million without access to any facilities.
Data from 70 countries show that while most women and adolescent girls have menstrual materials and a private place to change, many lack sufficient materials to change as often as needed.
The report makes clear that as we approach the last five years of the Sustainable Development Goals period, achieving the 2030 targets for ending open defecation and universal access to basic water, sanitation and hygiene services will require acceleration, while universal coverage of safely managed services appears increasingly out of reach.
The JMP website, www.washdata.org, allows visitors to interactively access the full dataset, and download individual country files which include all of the data used to produce the estimates.
